Nevertheless, out of the numerous celebrity interviews I’ve done, this one was the weirdest. It was surreal because unlike with so many others, what you see on the screen is what you get in person. Sitting down with Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of MythBusters fame on November 28th before their performance of the MythBusters Behind the Myths Tour in Calgary, I felt like I already knew these guys, thanks to 10 years of watching their show with my children.

Speaking of children, both Adam and Jamie were active as kids, but not in the conventional athletic sense.

“I grew up in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and we lived a block from the Rockefeller property, which was thousands of acres of protected woodland,” Adam told me. “On any given Saturday morning I would get up and run through the woods for a few hours exploring, following rivers, climbing inside sewer drains; it was just seeing what kind of fun I could have.”

Things were similar for Jamie: “I grew up on an apple orchard with a lot of surrounding wooded area, and I ran everywhere,” he said. “I was outside all the time climbing trees. There was a lot of child labor, too — picking apples and loading apple boxes into trucks.”

I asked if they participated in any of the traditional sports growing up, and Adam replied with, “No. That was a different crowd than the one we hung out with.” I wasn’t really surprised to hear that. Adam did excel in one portion of gym class, however. “There were all sorts of sports block, and I was middling at all of those until they had an obstacle course,” Adam said. “That was basically what I did on the weekends, and I had the fastest time by 40%.”

As adults, they’re both intensely active, simply because of the show, but Jamie has a regimen that goes beyond television.

“I found that cardiovascular exercise boosts my mental performance,” Jamie said. “If I have a problem to solve, like an engineering one, and I get on a treadmill, then time disappears; all I know is an hour later I’m all sweaty and the problem has been solved.” Similarly, I’ve made a habit of going for a run to think on articles before sending them to my editors, and I always gain some new insight. “I work out regularly because I don’t see the mind and body as that separate,” Jamie continued. “There is a lot of research to show that exercise delays early onset of Alzheimer’s.” He is correct about that research, as I showed in this Los Angeles Times column last year.

“I also work out with weights,” Jamie said, and while on the road he gets creative with his lifting. “We use all sorts of materials on the show, and we have just done a thing with bungee jumping for apples, and the latex bands we used are a quarter-inch thick and you can do things like deadlifts and other exercise with them and it can be the equivalent of up to a couple of hundred pounds. I can get a really good workout just closed up in a bus with these things.”

But just the job itself is a helluva workout.

“MythBusters is a very physically demanding job,” Adam said. “If you see us building it on camera, then we built it in a very tight time frame, and there is a good amount cardiovascular exercise.” When it comes to getting hands-on in some of the stunts, however, Adam explained that they try not to go to the limits of their physical abilities, “because that’s where things get dangerous.”

Jamie then went on to describe the effort involved in dealing with a dead body.